Department: Foreign Language

Areas of expertise:

• Language and the law/forensic linguistics
• Discourse/conversation analysis
• Game theoretic pragmatics

Marianne Mason (doctorate, University of Georgia, linguistics) is a scholar in the areas of language and the law/forensic linguistics, discourse/conversation analysis, translation/interpreting studies, and game theoretic pragmatics. Dr. Mason studies police-lay person exchanges, specializing in the discourse of police interviews/interrogations and the intersection between case law and contemporary police interrogation practices in the United States and abroad. Her work has appeared in numerous peer reviewed journals in the areas of linguistics, criminology, law, communication, and translation/interpreting studies. She is also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (Fellow ’18). Her latest co-edited publication, The Discourse of Police Interviews (2020), explores the sociolegal, cognitive, and discursive framework of popular police interview techniques employed in the United States and abroad and the discursive practices of institutional representatives that can influence the construction and quality of linguistic evidence.

Her current area of research takes a corpus-based and game theoretic approach to the analysis of case law and forensic discursive exchanges. This research will be featured in her forthcoming book, Police Interrogation, Language, and the Law (2023), with Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Mason is also on the editorial board of Translation and Interpreting Studies: The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association. She is also a board member of the Society for the Study of Translation and Interpretation (SSTI)/National Association of Judiciary Interpreters & Translators/NAJIT.

Media contact: Eric Gorton, gortonej@jmu.edu